I am so full. I’m almost painfully full. It’s the kind of full that makes you think you could happily never eat again. And yet, another plate of food is being set in front of me. This time, it’s a glistening tangle of kanavai pirettal – stir-fried strands of cuttlefish cooked with spices, masala paste and tomatoes until golden and unctuous. I take a deep breath and add a spoonful to my plate where it joins glossy crab meat curry, vibrant yellow cashew nut curry, a dense lump of pittu – steamed ground rice and shaved coconut – and a bouncy, crispy, wafer-thin egg hopper.
I’m at Palmyrah in Colombo, a Sri Lankan Tamil restaurant owned by Shibani, a close friend of Eroshan Meewella, the restaurateur behind Kolamba restaurant group who are soon to open Adoh, a street food-focused Sri Lankan restaurant, and the reason I’ve come to Sri Lanka to eat my way around the island for a week. As I tackle yet-undiscovered levels of culinary generosity and activate my professional stomach (the portion of my tummy I somehow open to eat more food in the name of journalism), Eroshan (Ero) and his old friend Shibani are joking across the table, talking about restaurants. “It was because of meals like this that I opened Kolamba,” Ero tells me. “My Sri Lankan friends and I would complain that there was nowhere in London to take people for Sri Lankan food the way we’d eat it in Sri Lanka. So I decided to make it myself.”
Sri Lankan cuisine is a difficult one to define. In fact, when I ask people over the week how they would explain it, most are usually fairly vague in their response. Some say it’s ‘like Indian, but lighter’, others rhapsodise about the abundance of coconut and vegetables in their cooking. No one, however, can give a firm definition. That partly comes down to the island’s unique history and geographic location. Its proximity to India, of course, has had a part to play, as has the fraught colonial history which has seen the Portuguese, Dutch and Brits all vying for control of this little island – the teardrop, as people call it – over its history, alongside unique migration which has, among others, resulted in a strong Malaysian influence on the cuisine.
A butcher at Negombo Fish Market
Negombo Fish Market at sunrise
Then, of course, there is the island’s lush and verdant landscape – and the things that grow within it. Rice thrives in Sri Lanka’s hill country, and is a key element of many dishes – whether it’s in the middle of a plate of curries, reconstituted into a tangle of string hoppers, or as rice flour in the pockmarked hoppers that are perfect for scooping up curries. Being an island nation, fish features frequently, as do vegetables like jackfruit and breadfruit and, of course, lentils in dahls. Many curries and sambols feature coconut in some way or another, be it coconut milk as a liquid element, or cooling grated coconut to cut through any lingering spice from a dish.
One woman attempting to move the dial on that definition of Sri Lankan cuisine – particularly in the context of the island’s abundance of seafood – is Elizabeth Norris, chef patron of Club Ceylon in Negombo, a waterfront city just north of Colombo. After cutting her teeth in kitchens in London, Norris found herself increasingly drawn in by her annual visit to her mother’s family in Sri Lanka. Inspired by trips to Negombo’s thriving fish market and the sheer number of endemic Sri Lankan species that often get quickly shipped out internationally, she saw a chance to reclaim some of this exceptional product and put her own, London-accented twist on them. That materialised in Club Ceylon, a modern European restaurant using largely Sri Lankan ingredients where seafood sits front and centre, all of it cooked up in a ridiculously gorgeous 1940s colonial house.
Our lunch at Norris’s wouldn’t have felt out of place in London. Winkles are cooked in parsley and garlic butter, emperor fish crudo comes with delicate little flourishes of pomelo and grassy olive oil, tiny little sprats are fried until crispy and served with a dollop of aioli, while whole Indian tongue sole comes covered in a rich, clam-spiked parsley and dill velouté. It’s a far cry from the big, tangled plates of rice and curry we’ve eaten thus far, but it feels, in many ways, no less indicative of Sri Lanka. This is mainly down to Norris’s exceptional sourcing and her desire to tell a proper story of Sri Lankan seafood.
Rice thrives in Sri Lanka's lush and verdant landscape and is a key element of many dishes
We get a peek into just how respected she is on a trip to the Negombo Fish Market the following morning. Rising before the sun, and driving along the lagoon as it begins to crest the horizon, we pull up to the market when it’s in full swing. Buyers clamber for the best catch, fishermen haul trolleys full of fish on ice, and a man stands in a corner with a mallet ready to butcher anyone’s purchases. Moving through it is like playing a game of obstacles, hopping over puddles of fish guts, deftly navigating around tense auctions and leapfrogging the odd fish that has managed to slide away. Norris moves through it all like Moses parting the sea. People come up to ask her advice on a specific catch. Others show her a rare haul they’ve managed to pull in that day, and on one occasion, she helps a woman negotiate a suitable price for her purchases. The market buzzes with energy, and can feel intimidating at first glance, but watching Norris make her way through it’s clear the time and effort she’s put into building a community here that allows Club Ceylon to land and cook the incredible fish that it does. When we are finally deposited out of the chaos, we make a beeline for one of the roadside cafes that line the tarmac on either side of the market for a maalu roll – a spiced mix of oily fish rolled up in a savoury pancake and fried until crispy.
Club Ceylon might represent a European view of modern Sri Lankan dining, but to get a feel for the new wave of the country’s cuisine through and through, you’ll have to drive three hours south to Hiriketiya Beach. An idyllic, palm tree and surf shack-lined cove with some of the best waves in this part of the world, Hiriketiya is a wave rider’s catnip, pulling in surfers and backpackers like moths to a flame. At the far end of the sand sits Raa, a restaurant and bar from the team behind Smoke & Bitters around the corner, currently rated number 14 on Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2025 list.
As the sun shines golden on late evening surfers and a longboarder lazily rides a perfect wave to shore, we settle in for a feast of epic proportions. Bulky lagoon prawns come draped over a silky south curry sauce, Negombo lagoon crab is given a similar treatment, while a melting brick of clay pot-braised Kalu pork sits stoutly in a black pepper curry. There is crispy cassava with green chilli dressing, and punchy lentil and prawn patties tempered by a squeeze of lime. It is, Ero tells me over an arrack cocktail, the closest thing he thinks we’ve eaten to what they serve in Kolamba in terms of style. As I extricate a wodge of prawn meat from its shell, waves crashing behind me while surfers whoop and shout, I simply wish Soho or Shoreditch had quite so beautiful a setting.
To contextualise the food at Raa and Kolamba, though, we must first travel inland to Ella in Sri Lanka’s hill country. As we climb up from the coast, hairpin turns and wayward tuktuks straddling sheer drops have me clutching the side of my chair, white knuckled and staring ahead. In the brief moments of respite from fear, I summon the confidence to take in the view; waterfalls cascade down jagged rock before dipping below the road into an unseen canyon, lush greenery hugs the tarmac and climbs precipitously up the side of mountains, and monkeys peek tentatively out from branches.
The views at Nine Skies
“I haven’t been here in years,” Eroshan remarks as we drive through the now popular backpacker town. “It used to just be a tiny little village in the hills – now look at all of this! There’s a nightclub!” Our destination, Nine Skies, is a little further out of town, though, trading elephant trouser-clad travellers for expansive views over the mountains and pure, unadulterated peace. A former tea planter’s bungalow just above Demodara Train Station, Nine Skies immerses you in one of Sri Lanka’s biggest exports: tea. It’s a fitting destination for a complete education on the country’s cuisine at its most classic.
Our first lesson comes from Theeka at Ella Spice Garden, hidden behind the town’s main drag. Following a tour of his abundant garden where durian and cacao grow alongside clove and peppercorns, we don our aprons and get to work. From a garlic curry that utilises a whopping 30 cloves to mellow dhal and sticky, sweet and salty eggplant pickle, it’s an introduction to how coconut and spices act as the touchstones of this versatile cuisine. What we’ve cooked feels miles away from Norris’s food in Negombo, and yet it speaks to the same cultivated sense of place.
Passing the pans back to the professionals, our education continues back at Nine Skies over dinner, where, across two nights, Eroshan meticulously curates a menu to cover as many bases of this multifaceted cuisine as possible. There are slow-cooked meat gravies, robust jackfruit, cooling coconut-fuelled dahls and sour mango curries. Sambols in all forms are piled high in bowls, from diced up green aubergine – a smaller, slightly sweeter version of its purple counterpart – to the classic pol sambol, which sees grated coconut, chilli, lime juice and salt mixed together to create a punchy, zingy textural powerhouse seen on almost any Sri Lankan plate, breakfast, lunch or dinner.
We make a beeline for a maalu roll – a spicy mix of oily fish in a savoury pancake
This classic coconut mixture is a key item on both Kolamba menus, and will feature on the soon-to-open Adoh menu too. As are many of the things we eat across the week – hot butter cuttlefish and mango curry at Kolamba Soho, king prawn string hopper and breadfruit curry at Kolamba East, and, of course, kothu at Adoh, which aims to celebrate the best of Sri Lanka’s more casual, everyday meals.
Originally invented as a way to use up old roti, kothu is now one of Sri Lanka’s most popular street food dishes. People feast on it after one too many drinks at the bars of Colombo, taxi drivers pull up to kothu stalls, their cars idling in the street as they quickly refuel between rides, and tourists feast on plate after plate in seaside shacks across the island. It sees roti chopped up into strips and stir-fried with onion, vegetables, eggs, meat or seafood and spices. We eat it a few times across our trip, but, without a doubt, the best iteration is at Sugar Bistro in Galle Fort, another restaurant owned by a friend of Ero. Here, the kothu is made with delicate crab meat and served with a rich seafood sauce to pour over the top. The gratifying texture of the roti alongside the deeply flavoured sauce belies the dish’s inherent simplicity.
Produce at the Sunday Negombo Vegetable Market
A woman cracking open a coconut at the Sunday Negombo Vegetable Market
On my first day back in London, I try to beat the jet lag with a trip to the Victoria Park Sunday market. The first thing I see is a kothu stall, with two guys chopping up roti on the grill just like I’d seen the chefs doing a few days before in Colombo. It’s an apt reminder of the international nature of this cuisine, and how Sri Lankan food is so much more than just the sum of its parts. It’s a story of the movement of people, of a land and sea full of life.
Sri Lanka is a country that has weathered countless invasions, colonisations and a civil war that lasted for almost three decades. Each notch in the island’s history hasn’t just left its impact on the land and people; it’s also had its part to play in the food, too. Yes, Sri Lankan cuisine is black pepper, coconut, rice, turmeric and chillies, but it’s also piping hot cups of tea, delicate, expertly fried hoppers and big, juicy, bright orange crabs – whether they’re cooked in a pepper gravy at Ministry of Crab or fried in paprika and garlic at Club Ceylon. It’s a new wave of Sri Lankans cooking up a modernised version of the cuisine they grew up on for hungry surfers in an idyllic cove. It’s a British Sri Lankan guy, Eroshan, hoping to package up the food he likes to eat with friends in his birth country to bring a slice of that culture to his chosen home in the UK. It’s two dudes stir-frying roti in the early summer sun in the park just down the road from my flat in East London. It might be hard to pin down a specific definition of Sri Lankan food both in the country and out, but I can think of one word that does that best: delicious.
